This book is devoted to the multifaceted career of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), who is regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the history of film and radio. It examines ...
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This book is devoted to the multifaceted career of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), who is regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the history of film and radio. It examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theatre, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. It details how Roxy built an influential and prolific career as a film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theatre manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. It relates key aspects of his career: how he helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and movie going become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The book highlights how showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the movie-going experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theatre into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. It explains how Roxy's interest in media convergence also reflected a larger movement in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises and exploit them through content release “events”.Less

American Showman : Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935

Ross Melnick

Published in print: 2014-06-17

This book is devoted to the multifaceted career of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), who is regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the history of film and radio. It examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theatre, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. It details how Roxy built an influential and prolific career as a film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theatre manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. It relates key aspects of his career: how he helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and movie going become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The book highlights how showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the movie-going experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theatre into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. It explains how Roxy's interest in media convergence also reflected a larger movement in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises and exploit them through content release “events”.

This book provides an in-depth understanding of Bruce Lee and examines the artist from both a cultural and historical perspective. The work begins by contextualizing Lee, examining his films and ...
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This book provides an in-depth understanding of Bruce Lee and examines the artist from both a cultural and historical perspective. The work begins by contextualizing Lee, examining his films and martial arts work, and his changing cultural status within different times and places. It then examines Bruce Lee's films and philosophy in relation to the popular culture and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s. It also addresses the resurgence of his popularity in Hong Kong and China in the twenty-first century. The study also explores Lee's ongoing legacy and influence in the West, considers his function as a shifting symbol of ethnic politics and examines the ways in which he continues to inform film-fight choreography in Hollywood. Ultimately the book argues that Lee is best understood in terms of “cultural translation” and that his interventions and importance are ongoing.Less

Beyond Bruce Lee : Chasing the Dragon Through Film, Philosophy, and Popular Culture

Paul Bowman

Published in print: 2013-03-26

This book provides an in-depth understanding of Bruce Lee and examines the artist from both a cultural and historical perspective. The work begins by contextualizing Lee, examining his films and martial arts work, and his changing cultural status within different times and places. It then examines Bruce Lee's films and philosophy in relation to the popular culture and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s. It also addresses the resurgence of his popularity in Hong Kong and China in the twenty-first century. The study also explores Lee's ongoing legacy and influence in the West, considers his function as a shifting symbol of ethnic politics and examines the ways in which he continues to inform film-fight choreography in Hollywood. Ultimately the book argues that Lee is best understood in terms of “cultural translation” and that his interventions and importance are ongoing.

This book offers a series of case studies that throw light on the type of films that are collectively known as bio-pics. It asks whether the bio-pic is a genre in its own right, or whether such films ...
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This book offers a series of case studies that throw light on the type of films that are collectively known as bio-pics. It asks whether the bio-pic is a genre in its own right, or whether such films are merely footnotes to other more traditional genres such as western or costume dramas. It shows how bio-pics, unlike other genre forms, seem to share no familiar iconography, codes, or conventions. They can be set anywhere and at any time. It argues that what links them is, quite simply, the fact that the films depict the life of an “important” person. Through a carefully selected range of thematically linked (English-language) bio-pics released since 1990, this book explores key issues surrounding their resurgence, narrative structure and production. It also looks at the issue of subject representation or misrepresentation in bio-pics and the critical response these type of films have engendered. The films under discussion are grouped around a number of professions (writers, singers, politicians, sportsmen, criminals, artists). This allows for comparisons to be drawn about the way in which similar subject matter is approached.Less

Bio-pics : A Life in Pictures

Ellen Cheshire

Published in print: 2014-12-16

This book offers a series of case studies that throw light on the type of films that are collectively known as bio-pics. It asks whether the bio-pic is a genre in its own right, or whether such films are merely footnotes to other more traditional genres such as western or costume dramas. It shows how bio-pics, unlike other genre forms, seem to share no familiar iconography, codes, or conventions. They can be set anywhere and at any time. It argues that what links them is, quite simply, the fact that the films depict the life of an “important” person. Through a carefully selected range of thematically linked (English-language) bio-pics released since 1990, this book explores key issues surrounding their resurgence, narrative structure and production. It also looks at the issue of subject representation or misrepresentation in bio-pics and the critical response these type of films have engendered. The films under discussion are grouped around a number of professions (writers, singers, politicians, sportsmen, criminals, artists). This allows for comparisons to be drawn about the way in which similar subject matter is approached.

This book analyzes the role of popular blockbuster films made by Bollywood in the making, unmaking and remaking of modern India. It explains that Bollywood films are India’s most popular ...
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This book analyzes the role of popular blockbuster films made by Bollywood in the making, unmaking and remaking of modern India. It explains that Bollywood films are India’s most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. It argues that Bollywood’s blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation’s dispersed anxieties and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes “India.” The book provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. It covers themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community, and shows how these capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. It reveals the cinema’s social impact across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-star genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. It includes studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009). Overall it conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.Less

Bollywood's India : A Public Fantasy

Priya Joshi

Published in print: 2015-03-03

This book analyzes the role of popular blockbuster films made by Bollywood in the making, unmaking and remaking of modern India. It explains that Bollywood films are India’s most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. It argues that Bollywood’s blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation’s dispersed anxieties and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes “India.” The book provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. It covers themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community, and shows how these capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. It reveals the cinema’s social impact across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-star genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. It includes studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009). Overall it conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the ...
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A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film’s psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media’s sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public’s understanding of the modern prison.Less

Carceral Fantasies : Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America

Alison Griffiths

Published in print: 2016-08-16

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film’s psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media’s sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public’s understanding of the modern prison.

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, ...
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Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This book considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs and Documenteur (1980–1981), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.Less

The Cinema of Agnès Varda : Resistance and Eclecticism

Delphine Benezet

Published in print: 2014-05-20

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This book considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs and Documenteur (1980–1981), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.

Aki Kaurismäki is an enigma, an eminent auteur who claims his films are a joke. Since 1983, Kaurismäki has produced classically styled films filled with cinephilic references to film history. He has ...
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Aki Kaurismäki is an enigma, an eminent auteur who claims his films are a joke. Since 1983, Kaurismäki has produced classically styled films filled with cinephilic references to film history. He has earned an international art-house audience and many prizes, influencing such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Yet Kaurismäki is often depicted as the loneliest, most nostalgic of Finns (except when he promotes his films, makes political statements, and runs his many businesses). He is also depicted as a bohemian known for outlandish actions and statements. This book is a first English-language study of this eccentric director. Drawing on revisionist approaches to film authorship, the text links the filmmaker and his films to the stories and issues animating film aesthetics and history, nostalgia, late modernity, politics, commerce, film festivals, and national cinema.Less

The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki : Contrarian Stories

Andrew Nestingen

Published in print: 2013-06-25

Aki Kaurismäki is an enigma, an eminent auteur who claims his films are a joke. Since 1983, Kaurismäki has produced classically styled films filled with cinephilic references to film history. He has earned an international art-house audience and many prizes, influencing such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Yet Kaurismäki is often depicted as the loneliest, most nostalgic of Finns (except when he promotes his films, makes political statements, and runs his many businesses). He is also depicted as a bohemian known for outlandish actions and statements. This book is a first English-language study of this eccentric director. Drawing on revisionist approaches to film authorship, the text links the filmmaker and his films to the stories and issues animating film aesthetics and history, nostalgia, late modernity, politics, commerce, film festivals, and national cinema.

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human ...
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One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and also identifies in them a powerful, if discursively repressed, queer sensitivity, alongside a pattern of tensions and paradoxes. This book offers new keys to understand the lasting and ever-renewed appeal of the Russian director's Janus-like and surprisingly dynamic cinema—a deeply original and complex body of work in dialogue with the past, the present and the future.Less

The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov : Figures of Paradox

Jeremi Szaniawski

Published in print: 2014-02-04

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and also identifies in them a powerful, if discursively repressed, queer sensitivity, alongside a pattern of tensions and paradoxes. This book offers new keys to understand the lasting and ever-renewed appeal of the Russian director's Janus-like and surprisingly dynamic cinema—a deeply original and complex body of work in dialogue with the past, the present and the future.

Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile and daring directors. His ability to cut across cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has given him recognition in all corners of the world, the ability ...
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Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile and daring directors. His ability to cut across cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has given him recognition in all corners of the world, the ability to work with complete artistic freedom whether inside or outside of Hollywood, and two Academy Awards for Best Director. He has won astounding critical acclaim for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which transformed the status of martial arts films across the globe, Brokeback Mountain (2005), which challenged the reception and presentation of homosexuality in mainstream cinema, and Life of Pi (2012), Lee's first use of groundbreaking 3D technology and his first foray into complex spiritual themes. This book analyzes all of his career to date: Lee's early Chinese trilogy films (including The Wedding Banquet, 1993, and Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994), period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), blockbusters (Hulk, 2003), and intimate portraits of wartime psychology, from the Confederate side of the Civil War (Ride with the Devil, 1999) to Japanese-occupied Shanghai (Lust/Caution, 2007). It examines Lee's favored themes such as father–son relationships and intergenerational conflict in The Ice Storm (1997) and Taking Woodstock (2007). By looking at the beginnings of Lee's career, the book positions the filmmaker's work within the roots of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, as well as the larger context of world cinema.Less

The Cinema of Ang Lee : The Other Side of the Screen

Whitney Crothers Dilley

Published in print: 2014-12-30

Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile and daring directors. His ability to cut across cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has given him recognition in all corners of the world, the ability to work with complete artistic freedom whether inside or outside of Hollywood, and two Academy Awards for Best Director. He has won astounding critical acclaim for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which transformed the status of martial arts films across the globe, Brokeback Mountain (2005), which challenged the reception and presentation of homosexuality in mainstream cinema, and Life of Pi (2012), Lee's first use of groundbreaking 3D technology and his first foray into complex spiritual themes. This book analyzes all of his career to date: Lee's early Chinese trilogy films (including The Wedding Banquet, 1993, and Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994), period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), blockbusters (Hulk, 2003), and intimate portraits of wartime psychology, from the Confederate side of the Civil War (Ride with the Devil, 1999) to Japanese-occupied Shanghai (Lust/Caution, 2007). It examines Lee's favored themes such as father–son relationships and intergenerational conflict in The Ice Storm (1997) and Taking Woodstock (2007). By looking at the beginnings of Lee's career, the book positions the filmmaker's work within the roots of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, as well as the larger context of world cinema.

This book is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Béla Tarr's career through a close ...
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This book is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Béla Tarr's career through a close personal and professional relationship for more than twenty-five years. The book traces the development of Tarr's themes, characters, and style, showing that almost all of his major stylistic and narrative innovations were already present in his early films and that through a conscious and meticulous recombination of and experimentation with these elements, Tarr arrived at his unique style. The significance of these films is that, beyond their aesthetic and historical value, they provide the most powerful vision of an entire region and its historical situation. Tarr's films express, in their universalistic language, the shared feelings of millions of Eastern Europeans.Less

The Cinema of Béla Tarr : The Circle Closes

András Bálint Kovács

Published in print: 2013-05-21

This book is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Béla Tarr's career through a close personal and professional relationship for more than twenty-five years. The book traces the development of Tarr's themes, characters, and style, showing that almost all of his major stylistic and narrative innovations were already present in his early films and that through a conscious and meticulous recombination of and experimentation with these elements, Tarr arrived at his unique style. The significance of these films is that, beyond their aesthetic and historical value, they provide the most powerful vision of an entire region and its historical situation. Tarr's films express, in their universalistic language, the shared feelings of millions of Eastern Europeans.